According to The National Coffee Association, 54% of American adults, roughly 150 million people, drink 3.3 cups of coffee every day. To whom do they owe a debt of gratitude for their daily drink?
Goats.
Coffee
As one legend goes, a Yemenite mystic saw a group of old goats of leaping with “exceptional vitality” after eating a particular berry. The mystic tried the berries and got to feeling frisky, too. In another tale called “Kaldi and The Dancing Goats”, an Arabian goatherd observes gamboling goats, tastes the food they’ve been eating, and starts frolicking, too. Kaldi tells some local monks about his discovery, they take the berries, cook them to create a stimulating brew, and mornings become a lot easier to deal with for everyone from then on.
Horned animals aside, physical evidence suggests that coffee plants were cultivated in Ethiopia as early as the 9th or 10th centuries, exported throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and later to India and Indonesia. The first known coffeehouse appeared in Constantinople in 1475, from where the concept spread across Europe and on to colonial America, where they eventually turned into the Starbucks across the street from you now. Or is it in your building’s lobby?
But of the billions of cups consumed worldwide each year, what makes one better than the other? Is it the coffee bean’s provenance? Harvesting practices? Processing? How it’s roasted? Brewed? (more…)
